Salesforce & Industry News – August 2015

Aug 28, 2015

Salesforce & Industry News – August 2015

In the first of our roundups, we look at some of the major news from the world of Salesforce and the industries that use their platform. In the technology world, things change at an incredible pace. We’re here to help you keep up.

Supporting London’s female coders

Salesforce have sponsored the short-term lease of an eight-bedroom house in Brixton, as part of an summer school initiative to improve the chances of girls and young women in tech. The school is run by Anne-Marie Imafidon, a huge advocate of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) for women.

A former child genius, Imafidon studied at Oxford University when she was just 15, and graduated with a Masters at 19 – the youngest ever. She now works for an investment bank. With the support of Salesforce and other contributors, the STEMettes summer school will help young women from all over the UK develop their skills, and give them the perfect platform upon which to build a successful career.

Acquisitions abound

Whilst Salesforce has a reputation for investing rather than purchasing other companies, it has been revealed this month that Benioff’s lot paid over $33 million this year to buy three companies, including two small startup businesses. A huge chunk of this sum was the $24 million acquisition of Kerensen Consulting, whose Paris-based clients give Salesforce a useful foothold in that market.

The other two smaller firms are Toopher, and Tempo AI. Both were bought in the spring of 2015. The former is a mobile authentication application, whilst Tempo AI is a calendar app, which was actually disabled after the acquisition.

Revamping Lightning Experience

Although Salesforce has been working on this since 2013, the update to its Lightning Experience desktop user interface has caused quite a stir. After criticism of their existing aesthetics, this update is seen as a response to challenges from competitors in the market, ensuring that Salesforce remains the world’s leading CRM provider.

The new desktop user interface shares similarities with the mobile experience, and the new Lighting Experience meets expectations of enterprise applications having equally sharp visual design as consumer websites and apps. For a full overview of the improvements, see this blog post on Computer World UK.

The forecast is good

According to a report this month, Salesforce has seen revenue and profit results that were better than expected for this quarter. This is, in part, due to an increased demand for their cloud sales and marketing tools. They have increased their forecast from $6.55 billion to $6.6 billion for the year ending January 2016. Astronomical figures, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Salesforce has been acquiring genuine market share from its main CRM competitors, SAP and Oracle. This growth has been unrivalled, and looks to be sustainable for some time to come.